It takes more computing power, and money, to pay for training an LLM, compared to distilling an LLM that someone else has already trained. That's the economic difference.

> It takes more computing power, and money, to pay for training an LLM, compared to distilling an LLM that someone else has already trained.

And that is still less money than it took to create that data in the first place, which the AI companies then gladly took to use for training.